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Justin Chen Transcending the Labor of Existence “Thus sang they in the English boat A strong sense of joyous effortlessness is apparent in these sanguine closing lines to Marvell’s poem about a boat of emigrants rowing in Bermuda. Rather than expressing exhaustion or discouragement, the rowers sing with a “holy and a cheerful note” a song in praise of their God who “led [them] through the watery maze” and “lands [them] on a grassy stage / Safe from the storms, and prelate’s rage” (Marvell, 38, 6, 11-12). (1) Particularly striking is the image of the oars splashing regularly in the water, not primarily as a means of propulsion, but rather to accompany the rhythm of the song—almost as if the rowers’ love for and faith in God transfigures their labor and makes it a celebration rather than a chore. In Yeats’ quietly desperate poem, “Adam’s Curse,” the opposite image can be seen. As the three friends talk into the night, they come to the grim realization that “there is no fine thing / Since Adam’s fall but needs much labouring” (Yeats, 21-2). (2) The notion of labor and effort as inevitably linked to mankind’s fallen state is an especially interesting theme to trace throughout Yeats’ poem when considered in relation to Mina Loy’s theories on modern poetry and the unique ability of genius to overcome the imperfection inherent in human effort. Appropriately enough, the conversation in “Adam’s Curse” begins with a discussion of poetic creation. The narrator says, “A line will take us hours maybe; / Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought, / Our stitching and unstitching has been naught” (Yeats, 4-6). These sentiments seem to reject of the romantic desire for a poetic genius whose work can seem effortless by inspiration alone—the narrator appears to believe that such pure, unadulterated creation is not possible, since an intensely mediated process of writing and rewriting is necessary to produce a single line of poetry. Nevertheless, he also seems to believe that a successful poem must appear to have been the product of such effortless inspiration or else all the poet’s toil “has been naught.” Already, an emphasis on laboring to remove traces of the writer from the text is evident. He continues, “To articulate sweet sounds together / Is to work harder than all these, and yet / Be thought an idler by the noisy set / Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen / The martyrs call the world” (10-4). The narrator expresses a concern that the work of poets is devalued precisely because the best poetry appears to be so effortless. “Better,” he says, to “go down upon your marrow-bones / And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones / Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather” (7-9). The implication of these lines, of course, is that manual labor is more respectable in the eyes of the majority than poetic creation, because the latter appears to require no “real” work. The narrator’s female friend responds, “To be born woman is to know— / Although they do not talk of it at school— / That we must labour to be beautiful (18-9). Thus, the woman contends, other seemingly effortless effects, including female beauty, may require similarly intense inputs of labor. Again, there is a sense that these efforts go unnoticed or unappreciated by others because if successful, they are not immediately obvious. Yet both poetry and beauty seem to be qualities that ought to suffer from, or at least become strained by, continuous human meddling. In the romantic view of such subjects, at least, beauty and poetry should be spontaneous and natural to be perfect. Excessive human input would seem to mar this perfection, since it seems counterintuitive that something truly sublime could be the result of hard work and not some sort of immediate inspiration. Mina Loy addresses this topic to some extent in her essay on modern poetry. She writes of E. E. Cummings, “Fundamentally he is a great poet because his verse wells up abundantly from the foundations of his soul” (Loy, 160). (3) This description implies that good poetry is ultimately spontaneous and intuitive, and not nearly so burdened and difficult as Yeats’ poem might suggest. In other words, what makes Cumming great as a poet is his ability to create verse with as little artificial restructuring of his work as possible—the phrase “wells up” suggests some sort of natural fountain of inspiration that bubbles up from the poet completely unmediated, an extremely pure and romantic image. Indeed, she goes on to say, “I believe that the quality of genius must be largely unconscious” (Loy, 160). This idealistic sentiment immediately hearkens back to the romantic conception of the poet as a vessel for the expression of some other poetic power, and it is clearly at odds with Yeats’ assertion that “there is no fine thing / Since Adam’s fall but needs much labouring.” That is, either poetry is the product of intensely concentrated human labor (Yeats’ view), or it arises effortlessly from some wellspring of inspiration (Loy’s contention)—but it cannot claim both sources. Yeats goes on to discuss perhaps the most interesting example of mankind’s inability to produce any “fine thing” without a great deal of labor—love. The narrator says, “There have been lovers who thought love should be / So much compounded of high courtesy / That they would sigh and quote with learned looks / Precedents out of beautiful old books; / Yet now it seems an idle trade enough” (Yeats, 23-7). This passage is challenging to unravel. It suggests that the lovers who attempted to attain love by imitating “precedents out of beautiful old books” somehow failed, or at least such efforts are no longer made—“now it seems an idle trade enough.” But this sentiment seems to contradict the previous notion that love, like any other fine thing, would actually require sustained human labor. It seems, then, that Yeats does not consider the imitation of precedent—“sighing and quoting with learned looks”—to constitute “labouring.” Rather, the imitation is simply a sort of ritual that appeals to an older notion of love, but for some reason no longer leads to anything positive. Unfortunately, Yeats does not at first appear to provide the reader with any sort of alternative that might lead to success—as the narrator describes it, “We sat grown quiet at the name of love” (Yeats, 28). Thus, it is not clear from the poem whether love, like poetry or beauty, can be achieved by some application of human will. As the three friends sit in suddenly somber silence, the narrator describes how they see “a moon, worn as if it had been a shell / Washed by time’s waters as they rose and fell / About the stars and broke in days and years” (Yeats, 31-3). This image of the hollow moon seems to describe the futility of striving for love—the description of “a shell / Washed by time’s waters” recalls the “precedents out of beautiful old books” that have grown fruitless over time. Perhaps even with constant striving and effort, love is still unattainable. Yet the poem’s final stanza reverses this sense of apathy and weariness to some extent—or at least provides the possibility that love could still exist. The narrator says, “I had a thought for no one’s but your ears: / That you were beautiful, and that I strove / To love you in the old high way of love” (Yeats, 34-6). There is a strong sense of honest yearning in these lines, almost as if the narrator wants to reject the rest of the poem entirely and revert to some earlier, purer time when the attainment of true love was still a real possibility. In a sense, then, the narrator implies that the “old high ways of love”—i.e., the “precedents out of beautiful old books”—are in fact the only means by which love can be pursued. As discussed earlier, however, these old high ways do not constitute labor for the narrator in the sense that the writing of poetry or the construction of feminine beauty do. Rather, they seem to be remnants of the time before Adam’s fall, when fine things did not need “much labouring.” Yeats’ invocation of Adam’s fall necessarily calls to mind the Garden of Eden and all of the associated mythology. In the pre-lapserian world, perfection was still possible because man was still fully with God, and there was not the same concept of intensely applied labor—man tended to the plants and animals of the Garden out of a joyful love for God, and not with his eyes set on another goal. Thus, the “labouring” or “stitching and unstitching” that the narrator and his friends claim characterize any seemingly effortless production were not necessary before the fall. As Adam describes it in Milton’s Paradise Lost, “But let us ever praise [God], and extol / His bounty, following our delightful task / To prune these growing plants, and tend these flowers, / Which were it toilsome, yet with thee were sweet” (Milton, IV.436-9). (4) Adam describes his labor as “delightful,” and while he credits Eve with making their tasks much more pleasant than they otherwise would be, the point remains the same—the work is not a burden to him because it is not his primary concern. These sentiments are reminiscent in many ways of the passage from the Marvell poem cited above. The men in the boat are not conscious of their rowing as labor because like Adam in the Garden, their efforts are only secondary to them. The beautiful image of the rowers’ oars keeping time to their song of praise demonstrates this sort of unconscious, directionless application of effort that characterizes pre-lapserian labor. Unlike the three friends in Yeats’ poem, these men do not need to expend the majority of their energy making their pursuit appear effortless, because their labor is not directed at a specific goal. The poem does not describe whether the rowers are nearing their destination, nor does it explicitly state what exactly their destination is—note that the poem is titled “Song of the Emigrants in Bermuda” rather than “Song of the Emigrants rowing to Bermuda.” That is, the emphasis is not on arriving at a particular location, but rather on the process of rowing and the song itself. In many ways, then, the notion of mankind’s existence before the fall parallels Loy’s conception of poetic genius. Just as the rowers’ propulsion of the boat in Marvell’s poem is merely an effortless byproduct of their primary goal—worshipping God—so too is the great poet characterized by the unconscious nature of his work, according to Loy. In fact, Loy’s description of good poetry, modern or not, places a strong emphasis on a sort of organic genuineness. She writes that one must “beware of allowing mere technical eccentricities or grammatical disturbances to turn us from the main issue which is to get at the poet’s reality. We should remember that this seeming strangeness is inevitable when any writer has come into an independent contact with nature: to each she must show herself in a new manner, for each has a different organic personality for perceiving her” (Loy, 160). Thus, just as good verse must “well up abundantly” from the poet’s soul, so too must it reflect the character of the poet himself. While these sentiments do not directly refer to the notion of effort, they still imply that poetry, certainly a “fine thing,” requires a large component of intuitive, unconscious inspiration. After all, Loy does not state that a great poet must work to erase any traces of himself from his work. Quite the opposite, in fact—she suggests that this sense of the poet’s self is central to good verse, and that these small “eccentricities” ultimately give way to the poem’s underlying “reality,” which is of genuine importance. Furthermore, in describing the poet William Carlos Williams, she writes, he “will make a poem of a bare fact—just show you something he noticed...the poet would like you to realize all that it means to him, and he throws that bare fact onto paper in such a way that it becomes a part of Williams’ own nature as well as the thing itself. That is the new rhythm” (Loy, 161). Again, Loy places her emphasis on an organic integration of poet and poem—there is no sense that a poet must labor to write something that is not already a part of him, or to obscure traces of his own influence on the writing. If good poetry is characterized by the lack of a need for effort, there is again a disagreement with Yeats’ characters’ assertion that any fine thing requires much laboring. Perhaps Loy’s concept of effortless poetic genius is somehow related to the pre-lapserian utopia referenced by Yeats and described by Marvell. Indeed, the unconsciousness of Loy’s genius closely matches that of the rowers in Marvell’s poem. But whereas Marvell seems to suggest that man has the potential for some sort of access to this purer form of labor through a focus on God, Yeats’ poem does not hold the same optimism. In fact, “Adam’s Curse” ends with the narrator saying, “We’d grown / As weary-hearted as that hollow moon” (37-8). This dispirited sentiment seems to imply that time or some other intervening factor destroys the power of the “beautiful old books.” Perhaps Yeats is suggesting that the sustained effort viewed as necessary by the three friends is actually destructive when misapplied. In this case, a belief in the necessity of “much labouring” for any fine thing, including love, jades the potential lovers to such an extent that they grow as weary-hearted as a hollow moon—incapable of ultimately accepting that beautiful thing for which they once strove. The one character who seems to believe that perhaps this intense, wearisome labor might not be required for every fine thing is the narrator, who makes a positive statement—“you were beautiful”—and strives to use that statement as a basis for his love. In a sense, he seems to be attempting to reattain the pre-lapserian condition discussed above, for he strives to love “in the old high ways of love.” This language brings to mind an unfallen and purer emotion that seems strangely out of place in more modern, cynical times. Thus, like the rowers in Marvell’s poem, the narrator’s focus is not on a destination—the attainment of love—so much as it is on his immediate circumstances, and what he knows of his would-be lover. And for a brief moment, he appears to have been successful, for he writes, “It had all seemed happy” (Yeats, 37). In other words, he managed to attain love without that tremendous input of effort which, according to the characters in the poem, is necessary to produce a great work of poetry or a woman’s superficial beauty. This conclusion matches Marvell’s vision of the effortless rowing displayed by his boat full of faithful believers. In that sense, then, Yeats’ poem does offer some sort of optimistic, redemptive hope for attaining the “fine things” without having to spend time and effort in an almost undignified cycle of “stitching and unstitching.” Yet the poem’s conclusion still suggests that the narrator’s attempts end in failure because of some pervading sense of weariness. Although the “old high ways” appear to represent love before the fall, when fine things did not need “much labouring,” they are eclipsed by the pessimistic sentiments of the characters in the poem—it is no longer possible to believe in a love so simple and beautiful as that yearned for by the narrator. To put it in the language of Loy’s essay on modern poetry, the situation in “Adam’s Curse” is akin to a world in which no one believed in the concept of poetic genius, and it was instead thought that every line of verse was carefully belabored to remove any traces of the poet himself. As discussed earlier, this sort of artificial, post-production doctoring seems somehow impure—according to Loy at least, there is a sense that truly great poetry must emerge from the unconscious, essentially personal nature of genius, and not from much laboring, stitching, and unstitching. Yeats’ poem, then, can be viewed at once as a comment on the miserable state of human existence and as a plaintive plea to the reader not to let it remain as such. Yeats provides a positive, optimistic sentiment—“you were beautiful”—which stands alone in the poem as the one pure thought not hampered by human interference. Yet in the weary-hearted world as the three friends see it, there is no room for such unadulterated emotion. Perhaps if we, like Marvell’s faithful rowers or Loy’s unconscious poetic genius, reject this vision of the world and choose to focus on the “fine thing” for which we strive rather than the process of creation itself, we too can again approach the pre-lapserian ideal of effortless labor. Only then will our falling oars keep the time of our joyous work rather than remind us of the imperfect circumstances in which we exist.
Sources Cited 1. Marvell, Andrew. “Song of the Emigrants in Bermuda.” The Golden Treasury (Ed. Francis T. Palgrave). 1875. http://www.bartleby.com/106/114.html. Citations are line numbers. 2. Yeats, William B. The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats: Revised Second Edition (Ed.: Richard J. Finneran). Simon & Schuster, Inc. 1996. Citations are line numbers. 3. Loy, Mina. The Lost Lunar Baedeker (Ed. Roger L. Conover). The Noonday Press. New York. 1999. Citations are page numbers. 4. Milton, John. Paradise Lost: 2nd edition (Ed. Alastair Fowler). Addison Wesley Longman Inc., NY. 1998. Citations are in the format (Book.Lines) – i.e., (I.45-7) refers to book I, lines 45-7. |